General Portage question

[Elsipkitch9809]

Buenos dias everyone!

I have a Portage question and I wasn't sure where to post it, so I'm hoping this isn't the wrong place

Anyway, I have a theoretical question for either the gentoo originators or the community (whichever is applicable). The problem is I'm not exactly sure how to phrase this question. I know Portage is open source (its python after all). I'm wondering though whether Portage is (like GNU software) freely usable in other projects as long as proper license terms, etc are met.

For example, if someone were to make a linux distribution of their own, would it be illegal (not sure if thats the right term to use) to include Portage as that new distributions's package management system? Or maybe some derivative of Portage later on down the road? (Hoping my wording is okay)

Thanks for any info

[masseya]

This probably is in the wrong place, but no one really cares all that much. It's not like the search tool here would find it if it was in the right place anyhow. For future reference, a general question about something gentoo specific should go in All Things Gentoo.

It's an interesting question, and one that I've thought about a little before reading your post. Here's some info off the main gentoo site. I would think that it would be just fine [legally, etc..] for another distrobution to start using the portage system, but there are probably a lot of caveats.

I would think that if another portage based distro would come out it would have to either A) look a heck of a lot like gentoo or B) use their own portage tree. The reason I say this is that the ebuilds are set up to interact with a particular file structure and to check for dependancies in certain places. If another system were to use portage on top of a RH or MDK file structure, I think it would choke when it was searching for a dependancy in the wrong place. I could be totally wrong. I would like to think that the developers of portage wanted to make it portable to other file structures. (pardon the pin..) I honestly don't know because I haven't really done a lot of poking around in ebuilds.

However, if it's the case that there's no problems with file structure differences and portage would work just fine with the 'new' distrobution, I think that distro would have to come up with something to help it stay alive other than leaching portage out of the gentoo source. The package management system of a distro is pretty important. There are typically few meaningful differences between distros other than that. I suppose that they could try and make portage a wrapper for rpms and try to create a fully LFS compliant distro, but that would be ugly. The more I use portage the less I like rpms. It's so nice to be able to just use a system and not have to delve into the inner workings of it unless you are looking for a good time or bored.
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[delta407]